The Owl

The Owl by E.V. Lucas (1897)

"The Owl" by E.V. Lucas is an essayistic reflection on the narrator's encounters with owls and the particular quality of feeling those encounters produce. The narrator begins by contrasting the owl with the kingfisher, noting that while a kingfisher entrances and thrills, an owl cuts deeper, evoking mystery and darkness, particularly when seen at night. The narrator then recounts a personal story set one Sunday morning in early summer in a small pine-wood on a Kentish common. At half-past eleven he becomes aware of a young owl perched on a nearby bush, staring at him with steady, incurious orange eyes and blinking slowly at roughly three-second intervals. The owl is a beautiful arrangement in soft browns and remains almost entirely motionless. The narrator, fearing for the young bird's safety from Sunday afternoon villagers, captures it gently by spreading a handkerchief over it. The owl offers no resistance. He hands the bird to boys at a neighbouring cottage who have experience keeping owls and arranges for it to be released when older. The remarkable coincidence follows. The very next Sunday those same boys, who also skip church that morning, walk through the same pine-wood at exactly the same time and find and capture another young owl in what the narrator takes to be the same spot. The narrator notes the strangeness of this coincidence while being scrupulous to add that, truthful as he is, he cannot claim to have found a third owl on the following Sunday, though he was tempted to embellish the story. The narrator reflects that apart from owls seen at the Zoo, including fascinating small creatures from a distant land that live in holes in the ground, he had seen no owl close enough to observe carefully until a recent evening in Sussex. There, at half-light, a large barn-owl emerged from trees beside a road and flew silently before and over the narrator's moving vehicle for around two hundred yards before disappearing among some ricks. Its flight was utterly soundless, quieter even than fish moving through clear water, and its pale underside gleamed softly like a lamp in fog, appearing almost to diffuse a gentle radiance. This silence, the narrator reflects, is soothing and wonderful, and he would prescribe the sight of owls flying at twilight for any disordered mind, though he would not recommend for weak nerves the angry, screaming owls that sweep around his own house in the middle of rough nights, when they seem genuinely ominous. His owls live in the belfry. He has often watched at dusk for them but has seen them clearly only once, when two returned together in full noisy flight, one pursuing the other, appearing for a moment as black shapes beating against the sky before vanishing silently into the masonry as completely as water into sand. The sight explains, he thinks, why some rural minds take owls to be not birds at all but disembodied spirits. The narrator draws together his different experiences of owls, noting the wide gulf between the quarrelling night creatures returning to the belfry, the soft glimmering barn-owl ghosting down the Sussex road, and the mild lost young owl in the Kentish pine-wood. Yet even in the young bird's mild face, he observes, one could easily see the makings of something frightening. He concludes with the question of what owls truly are, whether wise as legend suggests or merely appearing so, whether genuinely sinister or only strange and carnivorous, admitting these things will probably never be known. He then describes a letter printed in the Evening Standard in the summer of 1910 from a lady in Hampshire whose neighbourhood had once been rich in owls but where they had lately grown scarce. Woken one night by an owl's cry she ran to her window and, mimicry of owls being a hobby of hers, called back. Instantly a crowd of owls appeared out of the darkness at her window, angry and threatening and uttering strange sounds. She had inadvertently spoken something of serious import in owl language, perhaps a grave insult or a battle summons. Whatever it was, it made her for a moment almost one of that mysterious nocturnal race, opening a door on a world the narrator considers vastly more enthralling than aviation or any modern invention, before it instantly shut again.

By E.V. Lucas · First published 1897 · Genre: Nature Writing, Essay, Memoir · 1,648 words

First lines

To return to the kingfisher and the epoch in one's life made by the / rare appearance of that glancing jewel, although this house is in / owlish country, and we hear owls from dusk to dawn, yet the sight / of one is hardly less rare and memorable. The effect is, of course, / totally different. A kingfisher entrances, thrills; one sees it and / glows. But the owl cuts deeper; one feels that one is in the presence / of a thing not necessarily of evil but of mystery and darkness. That / is to say, an owl at night. In broad day there can be nothing sinister / about him, as I happen to know as well as any one.

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The Owl is listed on Textopian as a short story by E.V. Lucas, dated 1897 CE.

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Tags

owls · birds · mystery · darkness · uncanny · essays · nature writing · personal narrative · anecdotes · England · Kent · Hampshire

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